472 



LYTTON, EDWARD ROBERT BULWER. 



productions, 

 it: 



The following is the beginning of 



Sweet are the rosy memories of the lips, 



That first kissed ours, albeit they kiss no more : 

 Sweet is the sight of sunset-sailing ships, 



Although they leave us on a lonely snore : 

 Sweet are familiar songs, though Music dips 



Her hollow shell in Thought's forlornest wells : 



And sweet, though sad, the sound of midnight bells, 

 When the op'd casement with the night-rain drips. 

 There is a pleasure which is born of pain : 



The grave of all things hath its violet. 

 Else why, through days which never come again, ^ 



Koams Hope with that strange longing, like Regret ? 

 Why put the posy in the cold dead hand ? 



Why plant the rose above the lonely grave ? 



Why bring the corpse across the salt sea-wave I 

 Why deem the dead more near in native land 1 

 Thy name hath been a silence in my life 



S'o long, it falters upon language now, 



more to me than sister or than wife 



Once . . . and now nothing ! It is hard to know 

 That such things have been, and are not, and yet 

 Life loiters, keeps a pulse at even measure, 

 And goes upon it business and its pleasure, 

 And knows not all the depths of its regret. 



The following is the first stanza of one of the 

 poems in the section " In' France," which is en- 

 titled " Progress " : 



When Liberty lives loud on every lip, 



But Freedom moans, 

 Trampled by Nations whose faint foot-falls slip 



Round bloody thrones ; 

 When, here and there, in dungeon and in thrall, 



Or exile pale, 

 Like torches dying at a funeral, 



Brave natures fail ; 

 When Truth, the armed archangel, stretches wide 



God's tromp in vain, 

 And the world, drowsing, turns upon its side 



To drowse again ; 

 O Man, whose course hath called itself sublime 



Since it began, 

 What art thou in such dying age of time, 



As man to man ? ^ 



In an entirely different vein, but belonging to 

 the same period, is the poem " Astarte " : 



When the latest strife is lost, and all is done with, 

 Ere we slumber in the spirit and the brain, 



We drowse back, in dreams, to days that life begun 



with, 

 And their tender light returns to us again. 



1 have cast away the tangle and the torment 



Of the cords that bound my life up in a mesh : 

 And the pulse begins to throb that long lay dormant 

 'Neath their pressure; and the old wounds bleed 

 afresh. 



And again she comes, with all her silent graces, 

 The lost woman of my youth, yet unpossest : 



And her cold face so unlike the other faces 



Of the women whose dead lips I since have prest. 



I remember to have murmured, morn and even, 

 " Though the Earth dispart these Earthlies, face 

 from face, 



Yet the Heavenlies shall surely join in Heaven, 

 For the spirit hath no bonds in time or space. 



" Where it listeth, there it bloweth ; all existence 

 Is its region ; and it houseth, where it will. 



I shall feel her through immeasurable distance. 

 And grow nearer and be gathered to her still." 



Earth's old sins press fast behind me, weakly wail- 

 ing : 



Faint before me fleets the good I have not done : 

 And my search for her may still be unavailing 



'Mid the spirits that are passed beyond the sun. 



Many of Lord Lytton's poems bear evidence of 

 religious fervor and longing. Among those in 

 this volume is one on the Scripture passage, "Ye 

 seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified : he 

 is risen ; he is not here " : 



If Jesus came to earth again, 



And walked, and talked, in field, and street, 

 Who would not lay his human pain 



Low at those heavenly feet 1 



And leave the loom, and leave the lute, 

 And leave the volume on the shelf, 



To follow him, unquestioning, unite, 

 If 'twere the Lord himself 



How many a brow with care o'erwom. 

 How many a heart with grief o'crladen, 



How many a youth with love forlorn, 

 How many a mourning maiden, 



Would leave the baffling earthly prize 

 Which fails the earthly, weak endeavor, 



To gaze into those holy eyes. 

 And drink content forever ! 



The last book of "The Wanderer," called 

 " Palingenesis," opens thus : 



My Saviour, dare I come to thee, 

 Who let the little children come? 

 But I ? . . . my soul is faint in me ! 

 I come from wandering to and fro 

 This weary world. There still his round 

 The Accuser goes : but thee I found 

 Not anywhere. Both ioy and woe 

 Have passed me by. I am too weak 

 To grieve or smile. And yet I know 

 That tears lie deep in all I do. 

 The homeless that are sick for home 

 Are not so wretched. Ere it break, 

 Receive my heart ; and for the sake, 

 Not of my sorrows, but of thine, 

 Bend down thy holy eyes on mine, 

 Which are too full of misery. 



The next year he published, still under his 

 pen-name of Owen Meridith, " Lucile," a novel 

 in verse. The dedication to his father explains 

 his feeling about the poem : 



I dedicate to you a work, which is submitted to the 

 public with a diffidence and hesitation proportioned 

 to the novelty of the effort it represents. For in this 

 poem I have abandoned those forms of verse witli 

 which I had most familiarized my thoughts, and have 

 endeavored to follow a path on which I could discover 

 no footprints before me, either to guide or to warn. 



There is a moment of profound discouragement 

 which succeeds to prolonged effort ; when, the labor 

 which has become a habit having ceased, we miss the 

 sustaining sense of its championship, and stand, with 

 a feeling of strangeness and embarrassment, before 

 the abrupt and naked result. As regards myself, in 

 the present instance, the force of all such sensations is 

 increased by the circumstances to which I have re- 

 ferred. And in this moment of discouragement and 

 doubt my heart instinctively turns to you, from whom 

 it has so often sought, from whom it has never failed 

 to receive, support. 



Feelings only such as those with which, in days 

 when there existed for me no critic less gentle than 

 .yourself, I brought to you my childish manuscripts 

 feelings only_ such as those which have, in later years, 

 associated with your heart all that has moved or oc- 

 cupied my own lead me once more to seek assurance 



